Dmitri Bulushev

Position

Department / Business Unit

GRC-EPFL

Institution

Disciplines

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

City

State / Provence

Lausanne

Country

Website

Switzerland

Fax

Dmitri A. Bulushev graduated from the Novosibirsk State University (Russia) and joined the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis. There he was working as a researcher and received his PhD in Chemistry (Chemical Kinetics and Catalysis) in 1991. From 1995 to 1997 he was a visiting researcher at the Gent University (Belgium) and in 1997 he moved to Ecole Politechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland). His research area includes studies of catalytic reaction mechanisms, elucidation of the factors determining the activity and selectivity of catalysts in different reactions via transient response techniques, characterization of catalysts, “in situ” spectroscopic, isotopic, adsorption and temperature-programmed methods. Participating in international and industrial projects he developed quantitative approaches of determination of active sites concentration and methods of determination of the state of active component in different catalysts. Later, some of these techniques were used in other scientific centers.

Career Highlights

His nanoscience research is mainly focused on the size effect in catalysis. Thus, it was shown that gold nanoparticles of 3-5 nm on activated carbon fibers were extremely active at room temperature CO oxidation contrary to bigger ones (1). Silver was shown also to possess interesting properties. Big silver particles (>30 nm) were found to be active in ethylene epoxidation and inactive in hydrogen isotopic exchange in ethylene, while small particles (3-7 nm) were active in the latter reaction and inactive in the former one (2). He also studied an effect of the active component dispersion in catalysis by oxides. Thus, it was demonstrated that isolated and polymeric monolayer vanadia species were active in toluene partial oxidation over vanadia/titania catalysts while bulk TiO2 and V2O5 were almost inactive (3). Similarly, for Fe-ZSM-5 catalysts in N2O decomposition and benzene hydroxylation by N2O bulk iron oxide was found inactive while specific iron (II) sites in extraframework positions of zeolites possessed extremely high reactivity (4). Dr. Bulushev is a co-author of more than 40 articles and is a referee for some catalytic and chemical engineering journals. He reported his results worldwide (Washington, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, etc.) and was involved in supervision of students’ and PhD students’ works. Together with Dr. Yuranov he published an entry “Noble metals nanoparticles on carbon fibers: synthesis, properties and applications” in the Dekker Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (5).